Physics Week in Review: January 18, 2014

This week saw the release of the Edge Annual Question: What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Many excellent responses were submitted; the Time Lord zeroed in on the various entries dealing with Falsifiability, cause and effect, IQ, and the universe as his faves, while Kate Clancy took a good, hard look at The Way We Produce and Advance Science: "As unadulterated as we may want to envision science, the scientific enterprise is run by people, and people often run on implicit bias."

I think all the Edge contributors should do this for the next installment: Student Rickrolls his teacher in this ingenious quantum physics essay.

Ball lightning--often reported but never confirmed, previously dismissed as hallucination--turns out to be real. Per New Scientist: "In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event." Related: Almost No Americans Die From Lightning Strikes Anymore. Why?

With Math as Inspiration, a New Form of Flyer: a hovering, flapping-wing machine that looks like a flying jellyfish.

What happens when an unstoppable PR force hits an NP-hard problem? The answer's getting clearer. Scott Aaronson runs down the latest developments in the D-Wave quantum computing saga.

Proposed Time Machine Could Also Clone Objects: Access to the past would open new possibilities of more than travel. “It’s like there are 1,000 different particles… but in fact they’re all the same particle you sent in the beginning... You just have all these temporary copies emerging from and going back into these wormholes.”

The Case of the Telephone in His Hat (1894): a very early tale of electronic eavesdropping. "Lawyer Laflin Mills, of Chicago, is the author of a very ingenious scheme, involving the use of a telephone in a silk hat..."

The Unseen Beauty of High Speed Water Drop Photography: more amazing pix from Markus Reugels. "Through dizzying combinations of lighting, food colouring, surfaces (liquid and solid) and airstreams; Reugels creates incredible liquid art that occurs and disappears in a split-second, but is immortalized through his photography."

Life is a Braid in Spacetime. The most interesting property of your spacetime tube isn’t its shape, but its structure, which is remarkably complex. Related: Ingenious: Max Tegmark with a birds-eye view on life and the universe.

Shape-Shifting Airplane Wing Design Prepares For Testing: First, fuel savings. Next? Maybe a whole new way to use wings.

Under Pressure, Does Evolution Evolve? Bacteria, yeast and other organisms that are under stress undergo more frequent mutations, which might be an evolutionary mechanism to help them cope with changing environments.

The Taste of Electrical Current. "It was sometime around 1752 that Johann Georg Sulzer decided (for reasons best known to himself) to put the tip of his tongue between two plates of (different) metal whose edges were in contact. The results were, quite literally, shocking." The taste of electric currents (part 2 of 2): Enhancing Saltiness with Cathodal Current.’

Diffraction in spider webs makes them as colorful as rainbows. "Either spiders are killing pixies and smearing their colorful blood on their webs or something else is going on here."

Particle accelerators join fight against brain cancer. Accelerator technology could be key to developing an effective treatment for a type of brain tumor currently considered incurable.

Teleology Rises From the Grave. "In his 1790 Critique of Judgment, Kant famously predicted that there would never be a “Newton for a blade of grass.” Biology, he thought, would never be unified and reduced down to a handful of mechanical laws, as in the case of physics. This, he argued, is because we cannot expunge teleology (goal-directedness) from living systems. The question “what is it for?” applies to living structures in a way that has no corollary in physics."

The many tragedies of Edward Teller: "a prime example of the harm that brilliant men can do – either by accident or design – when they are placed in positions of power."

Infinite Series: when the sum of all positive integers is a small negative fraction. Yes, negative. "This post involves math. Really bizarre, brain-melting math. The math itself is actually not that complicated—I promise!—but the result will carve out a piece of your soul and leave hollow space." But there were some nuances that the Bad Astronomer missed: here's a bit more on the weirdness of infinite series, written by Greg Gbur in 2010, and a slightly more technical take by Mark Chu-Carroll.

Einstein's Camera: photographer captures different parts of people at different times.

The Latest Update in the Hydrino Saga. "Real scientists, doing real work, don't pull nonsense like this. Mills has been promising a commercial product within a year for almost 25 years. In that time, he's filed multiple patents, some of which have already expired! And yet, he's never actually allowed an independent team to do a public, open test of his system. He's never provided any actual data about the system!"

Physicists harness the power of probability: What do the stock market, weather models and the discovery of the Higgs boson all have in common? They all are deeply indebted to statistics.

Twelve short films about 12 planets, each animated in a different style. Each planet has its own quirky personality, its own creature design, and a particular musical soundtrack.

Brains of Genius: What do Albert Einstein and mathematician Evariste Galois have in common?

"Chaosmos" board game keeps you on the edge of cosmic catastrophe. "The Chaos Clock counts down to the complete collapse of the universe. Hidden on some desolate planet protected by traps and trickery is an artifact that can save the cosmos — but you're not the only one after it."

Moving Cocktail Garnishes Harness The Power of Surface Tension. "Scientists have now developed a boat that zips across the surface of drinks, as well as a "flower" that sops up a tiny, sip-sized dollop of the beverage for your palate-cleansing pleasure."

Dorothy Hodgkin and the Year of Crystallography: The UK has a long and successful history in crystallography, but among its numerous Nobel Prize winners in the field, the only woman was headlined as a mere 'Oxford housewife.'

First in a series: #FollowFriday: Physicists to follow on Twitter. A number of scientists have taken to the social media site to share perspectives on new research and insights into their day-to-day lives.

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